Finding My Chi

I am going to a yoga class this morning.  I’ve been doing yoga off and on for the past several years — more off than on due to time constraints, but I love how regular practice makes me feel.  I also love the non-competitiveness of yoga.  A competitive person by nature, yoga is not a level playing field in which I can one day hope to “win.” I am not, and will never be, one of those women who can put her leg behind her head — Mr. Dingo has made peace with that — but in the classes I’ve attended, it’s feeling good in your own skin that is cause for celebration and not whether you can braid your hair with your toes.

I am looking forward to starting yoga again.  The years and calcification are catching up to me.  I move with all the stiffness of a zombie; not one of those new fangled George Romero Dawn of the Dead (2004) fast-moving zombies but one of the Night of the Living Dead (1976) ghouls — arms fully extended, knees locked.  I’m too young for this stiffness but I’ve always been this way.  At five years old, while other girls were aspiring to be the next Nadia Comaneci (yes, I’m that old) or starring in Swan Lake, my dance instructor told my mom that, “Dingo’s talents lie in other areas.” She did not specify exactly what those other areas were.  Although Mom tried to hide it, I could tell she was crushed.  Not because she had the stage mother aspirations of the other moms at my dance studio, but because she loved making the costumes for my dance recitals.  She truly missed her calling.  Mom belongs in NYC making costumes for Broadway.  Still, there were days in grade school when I thought that going to school dressed as a pirate right down to the eye patch was a bit much.  And, in retrospect, my mom standing in the hall for costume changes — going, for instance, from the Cat in the Hat for English to a pilgrim for History — now does seem excessive.

Years later I discovered yoga.  At that point it wasn’t that I wanted to look like a Degas portrait as much as I wanted to be able to bend over and tie my shoes without pulling a muscle.  Yoga was incredible.  It took me months to gain flexibility but my body felt good.  I felt good.  So I’m off to the yoga studio this morning.  If I haven’t sprained my fingers or torn a ligament, I will give you an update later this evening or tomorrow.

For now, meditate on the peaceful expression of the Yoga Frog gracefully executing Tree Pose on my terrace.

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Me and My Peeps

Mr. Dingo left for a week-long business trip.  In Miami.  Yes, Miami.  I’m not feeling too bad for him.  It’s 40 degrees here.  It’s in the mid-70s in Miami.  Yeah, not feeling for you Mr. Dingo.  Part of me wanted to make this trip with him, but the other part of me, the part that can’t fit into my sassy pink bikini, is glad that I don’t have to put my ass-ets on display right now.  Mr. Dingo is a fantastic cook.  When he’s gone my dining options are limited to salads and sandwiches.  This is the perfect time to prepare for our trip to Vegas.  I’m going to use this week of salad and sandwiches to kick start my healthy living plan.  You know, the plan I talked about on Sunday.  You did read Sunday’s post didn’t you?  No?  Okay, I’ll give you a few minutes to scroll down and read it.

…Your’re back.  That was quick. Okay, so as part of my healthy living plan I’m cutting back on the sweets.  I’ve got a mad sweet tooth.  In the interest of full disclosure, Mr. Dingo left a Snickers Bar on his desk.  I snickered as I ate it.  But that’s it, I promise.  No more sweets.  Except for Peeps.  I love Peeps.  Those damn yellow chicks are sugary, marshmallowy, teeth-aching goodness.  Not only has the calendar screwed up my sleep with Daylight Savings Time, but it’s placed Easter and my healthy living plan in direct confrontation.  Good v. Evil.  Just between you and me, Satan would have had an easier time tempting Jesus in the wilderness if he had just offered him some Peeps. 

To thwart the confectionary allure of yellow chicks and pink bunnies, I stocked up on fruits and veggies yesterday.  I may pick at the fruit but I’m pretty confident that the carrots and red peppers will live to be an overripe old age in my rotter.  Admit it; you have a rotter in your fridge as well.  Oh, the Maytag and Kenmore PR machine may call it a “crisper”, but we all know that once those veggies hit that drawer, they never see the light of day.

I’ve also incorporated exercise into my healthy living plan.  I had to pick my dropped jaw off the floor at least one hundred times while watching High School Reunion.  That’ll do wonders for the abs.  Have you seen this train wreck show?  In a nutshell, fifteen high school stereotypes (the jock, the outcast, the spoiled girl, the popular girl, etc) are plucked from the 1987 class of a Dallas, Texas high school and whisked away to a beautiful mansion in Hawaii.  Drama ensues.  The drama is about as manufactured as my Peeps and not nearly as tasty.  You can click here if you want to know more but believe me, you don’t. 

What makes people attend their high school reunions?  I know I went to mine just to show people how much I had changed from the skinny, insecure, big-haired, brainiac they knew.  Isn’t that a dumb reason to spend two hundred dollars on a dress, more bucks on a plane ticket, and a sleepless night?  Why in the world did I care about the opinions of people I hadn’t seen in 10 years a long time?  I didn’t love high school but I didn’t hate it either.  I was definitely glad to move on.  I hadn’t thought about most of my former classmates in years, yet when the reunion notice came I broke out into a cold sweat.  Had I changed enough I wondered?  Was it a change for the better?  Will the pretty girl have just gotten prettier, making my carefully applied make-up look like spackle on a monkey?  Will the quarterback still ignore me, perhaps bumping my arm and spilling my watered down drink all over my new dress as he launches for a chest bump with his former wide receiver?  Will they think that I am still the brainiac and ask me questions to test me?  By the power of Peeps, I hoped not.  In the intervening years, I’d replaced vital, need to know facts about chemical formulas, historical dates, and word problems involving trains leaving stations and widget production with useless trivia:  elephants are the only land mammals that can’t jump, a mosquito has 47 teeth, Da Vinci spent 12 years painting Mona Lisa’s lips.  I could go on and on.  This info won’t help me on my English Subject Matter GRE, but if Alex Trebek calls, I may be able to forgo Ph.D. work altogether.  But I digress….

I went to my reunion.  It conformed to every stereotype.  The pretty girl was working on her third divorce and prowling the room to find her next sugar daddy.  The quarterback had reached manatee proportions.  He and the rest of the team sat in the corner nursing their beers and their broken dreams with constant replays of high school games.  The nerd made lots of money in the dot com boom.  What is the brainiac supposed to become?  I don’t know.  I think I defied their expectations.  I was voted “Most Improved”.  Most Improved?  Most Improved!? It was meant as a compliment and years ago I would’ve basked in the title and hoped it came with a glittering tiara.  But as an adult, Most Improved, my ass.  Who were these people to keep judging me and why did I fall for it again?  Hadn’t I learned anything in the intervening years?  Yes, I had.  And so I left the reunion snagging some chocolate-covered strawberries on the way out.  Snagging all the chocolate-covered strawberries on the way out.  Did you know that a strawberry is not a true berry because its approximately 200 seeds are on the outside?

So I watched High School Reunion, smug and snug.  Snug.  The tightening of my waistband as I performed another waist bend to scoop my eyes off the floor after a particularly robust eye roll — really, this show is that ridiculous — brought my arrogance crashing to the ground.  My healthy living plan — exercise and eating right was really a mini-plan (and, you may have noticed, not a very successful one).  A plan to make me sleek and bikini ready to sit by a pool in Vegas to be judged thin and pretty by people I don’t know.  And yes, this time I want to be judged Most Improved.  Apparently, my Peeps, in all their artificial flavors and coloring are the only things keeping it real. 

This hypocrisy is brought to you by the letter “H”.

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Craptacular

I haven’t posted much this craptacular week.  Certain family situations had my hackles raised and claws drawn.  I might let you get away with a minor slight against Texas, but don’t mess with my Mama.  The helplessness of not being able to do anything for her but offer words of support angered me almost as much as the jackass that’s making her life difficult right now.  That the jackass happens to be another family member doesn’t help matters.  Maybe one of you out there is wondering whether I’m referring to you.  Well, if you have to wonder… So, I spewed enough acid in my potential posts to peel multiple layers of polyurethane off my hardwood floors (at one point when I was writing, Mr. Dingo mentioned, quite spontaneously, that he had never liked the monsters in Aliens).  And then I deleted my words in case there was a possibility that I would have to eat them later.  A few days before posting my first blog entry last month I read Julie Pippert’s post about How To Talk About Other People On Your Blog.  It was a thought-provoking post about how we blog about our personal histories and the people in our lives.  I’ve since printed out her Seven Guidelines and have it taped by my desk until I can make it to the tattoo parlor to have them etched into my forearm.  Even if I’d never read Julie’s post , I hope that I would’ve deleted my angry rants before posting them, but it’s nice to have a reminder for those times when the angel on my shoulder is taking a day off and the devil is dancing up and down on the SUBMIT key.

In other crapitudinous news, Dingo Girl decided that the dog food and copius table scraps we usually feed her just weren’t good enough.  She decided to go for “the other white meat” and took a chunk out of a friend of ours.  Just because I cracked a lame but somewhat racially charged joke about it, believe me, it’s nothing to laugh about.  Having your dog bite someone is intolerable.  The fact that we live in NYC and a simple walk around the block puts us in contact with mouth-watering hordes at roughly every mealtime makes the situation all the more dire.  Beyond the scrumptiousness of this particular friend — whom Mr. Dingo and I have often commented would go well with a nice Chianti, lightly dusted with rice flour and quickly sautéed with cherry tomatoes and a light cream sauce — we don’t know what triggered her bite.  She hasn’t been feeling well lately and has been unusually skittish during our walks.  She constantly looks over her shoulder as if she’s being tailed and will dart away at the slightest sound and unexpected movement.  When this first began to happen, I thought, “She has those keen dog senses!  She knows something I don’t!  We had better run!” And the two of us would bolt down the street together screaming, running from nothing in particular.  Today, a guy wearing a hockey mask carrying a machete dripping blood could suddenly appear behind us causing her to freak out.  I would ignore her warning with a yawn and sigh.  She has set me up to be one of those stupid, oblivious people in horror movies!  Well, anyway, her skittishness has made me wonder what she gets into during the day when I’m at work.  Maybe The Vampire has recruited her into his secret agent network or something.  Or maybe she watches Nancy Grace on CNN all morning and has come to realize that evil lurks around every corner, but all we can do about it is cry and cry.

Up until now I’ve taken Dingo Girl on shopping expeditions.  That’s one of the great things about NYC.  Most stores allow canine companions and many have water bowls at the door and delicious treats behind the counter.  Among Dingo Girl’s favorite shopping haunts are Home Depot and Bed Bath and Beyond.  Dingo Girl is all into the DIY thing.  And if shopping for my DIY efforts isn’t enough to satisfy Dingo Girl’s appetite for treats, my execution of the actual DIY labor may distract me long enough so that she can sneak into Not a Dingo’s litter box for a feline fudge brownie.  Yum.  Often, though, we work as a team.  I create while she destroys.  If I get new curtains, that means she can lay on the old curtains and chew on the hardware.  If I buy new pillows, that means she can rip up the old pillows.  This may not sound appropriate to you, but that could only mean that you have never experienced it.  You see, together, we are the godlike creator/destroyer.  We are the Phoenix, rising from the ashes we fashion.  We are Shiva.  We are Bob Villa!

I spent two days calling trainers/behaviorists who work with aggressive dogs.  That was one of the hardest things to overcome — the label of “aggressive dog.” One trainer understood my qualms about labeling Dingo Girl and rephrased it, “so you have a dog that has exhibited aggressive behavior.” Yes, that’s more like it, though I prefer to think that she was inappropriately confrontational or unnecessarily argumentative.  Maybe the ultimate irony is that she now gets a trainer because she had a fit of rebellion, lashing out at authority in the form of a pulpy little human hand?  Well, after a lot of research and calling around I found someone I trust to help us.  This particular behaviorist doesn’t come cheap, but the cheap ones all asked if Dingo Girl bruised easily.  Really, for what we’re paying this behaviorist, I think Mr. Dingo and I should get to bite her.  We’ve just finished paying Dingo Girl’s surgical bills and thought that this month would be the month we get a little cushion.  Instead, this month is the month that Mr. Dingo and I have to decide who is going to sell their kidney.  I sold my soul last month, I think it’s Mr. Dingo’s turn to put up. 

So, those two things are what drove me into writing reclusiveness last week.  I didn’t know how to write about them and I was throwing myself a pity party.  Be glad I didn’t invite you to the party.  It was a last minute thing and all I had on hand were feline fudge brownies.

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Almost New Year’s Resolutions

How are you doing on your New Year’s Resolutions?  I read an article last month that said January 21st was the most depressing day of the year for many people because that’s when they assess how well they’ve stuck to their resolutions.  For me and Mr. Dingo, January 21st was not the assessment point.  We have to reassess at the end of every single month.  Medical bills, vet bills, and the fact that I was unemployed for a few months early last year really kicked our butts.  Our resolution for this year is to get out of debt; so we came up with a plan that does not involved robbing banks or printing money to help us reach our goal.  Basically, we are in the cash only lane from this moment on.  We pay for everything with cash.  Credit cards are only for emergencies.  Emergencies are Dingo Girl going into another seizure and not a sale at DSW Shoe Warehouse.  I don’t keep cash on me either.  Loose cash is waaay too easy to spend.  I use my ATM card.  There’s something about the act of pulling the ATM card out of my wallet that really makes me think about whether my purchase is necessary.

Anyway, this morning as I was pulling on my boots getting ready to take Dingo Girl to Central Park and I was thinking about the resolution.  But first, I must digress.  Getting my boots on is a real bitch.  They don’t have that handy little loop at the back to help you pull them on.  They used to have that handy loop.  However, two days after I got them, Dingo Girl decided to chew them off.  I guess she figured the only way her mama was going to build the muscles in her T-Rex arms was to make her struggle to pull on these damn boots.  I love these boots though, even without the bootstraps.  They’re Coast Guard boots that I ordered from U.S. Calvary and they rock.  You know that nasty six inch puddle of water or slush that’s at the corner of every intersection in New York City?  The puddle bottomless pit that leaves you with the option to make like a long-jumper in the Olympics or to walk up and down the edge of the street looking for a place to cross like a cow during a cattle drive?  Well, a puddle like that is nothing to these boots.  Nothing!  These boots laugh at deep puddles, one of those long, condescending sneers like you get from the chick at Victoria’s Secret when you ask her if this comes in your size.  I just wade right on in!  I am Moses!  My feet stay dry and warm.  Out of my way, you people herding along the edge of the curb looking for a shallow spot!  Anyway, these boots are a winter staple.  I have been so impressed with them that I actually wore them to work once hoping that they would be just as effective against the piles of bullshit that I slog through every day.  No dice.  The repelling properties of my Coast Guard boots are limited to water, slush, and snow.

So as Dingo Girl and I were headed to the park I began to think about our cash crunch, luxuries, necessities, and all kinds of things associated with altering our lifestyle for the foreseeable future.  And you know what I came up with?  I have everything I need to be happy.  I couldn’t always say that.  A few years ago, I was a mess.  Rock bottom.  That’s a lifetime ago and definitely a post for another day.  But today, this other life, the things that make me happy aren’t money or anything to do with money.  Don’t get me wrong, if I suddenly found five million dollars in my checking account like this guy did, I would seriously think about a Swiss bank account and a well-appointed hut in the Caymans.  But it’s sitting up until 2am talking with Mr. Dingo about politics, movies, the latest book we’ve read, or cooking a new recipe he found that give me happiness.  It’s cold, damp, snowy days like today with Dingo Girl ecstatic about playing in the snow and her doggie friends that make me smile.  I think you would agree with me that it’s the things that you can’t stick a price tag on that make us happiest, but why is it that we always think we need so much? 

Watching Dingo Girl play in the park knowing that Mr. Dingo would probably have a fire in the fireplace by the time we got home cold and shivering, anticipating a day of reading on the couch and perhaps writing the next chapter of my novel make me feel like the richest woman in the world.  And you can take that to the bank.

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